Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?
Assessing alternate models for Canadian news media
Plenty has been written about the many difficulties faced by legacy news media operations. You might even recall reading about the troubled CBC and the Liberal government’s ill-fated Online News Act in these very pages. Traditional subscription and broadcast models are drying up, and on-line ad-based revenues are in sharp decline.
As I’m sure you can appreciate, I’m quite happy with the work that’s possible right here on the Substack platform. A look at some other (mostly) Canadian Substack journalism sites testifies to the possibilities for success. But other folks are testing different approaches.
As a case in point, I just happened across the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF), an organization focused on publishing Canadian stories. I’m very picky when it comes to stuff I read, but I have to say the few articles I’ve seen so far are nicely researched and worth reading. The curated data resources they also provide are helpful.
But it’s the IJF’s business model that really caught my attention. IJF seems to maintain a very large staff. It’s clear that the $19,000 they earned from website subscriptions and merchandise sales in 2024 wouldn’t have gone very far towards meeting that payroll.
IJF accepts government money and they’re remarkably open about it. In fact, with admirable transparency, they prominently list each of the 21 sources of their $1.7 million in 2024 revenues - nearly all of which took the form of donations. IJF’s 2024 revenues rose from $1.04 million in 2023, and $614,000 in 2022.
Donations included $333,333 from a private Canadian charity called The Tiny Foundation and $200,000 from 3858278 Canada Foundation - a private charitable foundation operating as Inspirit Foundation. Supporting media organizations appears to be a major activity of both Tiny Foundation and Inspirit.
Nine other donations adding up to around $500,000 came from federal government agencies or organizations funded by the government. The programs included:
Canada Summer Jobs ($48,599)
The Local Journalism Initiative ($45,000)
The Labour Journalism Tax Credit ($33,146)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council ($30,000)
Publicly-funded organizations included:
University of Toronto ($12,000)
Data Sciences Institute ($110,000)
Independent Media Arts Alliance ($19,000)
Venture for Canada ($14,000)
Mitacs ($199,000)
Mitacs is a Canadian non-profit whose mandate involves promoting innovation. At least I think that’s what they do. I’ve long suspected that the more expensive an organization’s website design, the harder it is to figure out exactly what they do.
In any case, in 2021, Mitacs received a five-year federal grant for $708 million to “fund work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities that provide on-the-job training, and provide businesses with support to develop talent…” It would seem that some of that money went to IJF.
So how much journalism will a half million government-financed dollars a year buy you these days? Well, as I said, the content is pretty good and there’s a lot of it. Their articles seem well-researched, non-partisan, and fair. All that’s true. But is anyone consuming that content?
IJF has been around for years and I just found out about it thanks to clicking a rather incidental link somewhere on the internet. And I’m not the only one who missed the memo. Similarweb tells me that IJF received only 20,000 visits last month. That’s more or less what we get here at The Audit, and we didn’t bill taxpayers a single penny. For comparison, The Hub - which also receives no taxpayer funds - received around 297,000 visits, and a lot of their content gets additional exposure on other high-traffic platforms.
IJF has collaborated on projects with other news organizations like the CBC and CTV, which certainly increases the impact of their work. But it’s noteworthy that it could apparently only happen through the ongoing provision of significant public funding - over and above the millions payed out to the CBC and CTV themselves.
Given their reach - and alternative models - can we justify the public spending?
Mitacs is just another one of hundreds of ‘NGOs that the government finances. If you are an NGO that gets funded by the government, you are de facto a GOVERNMENT Organization. This is not a proper use of taxpayer money. All government funding of NGOs should be eliminated. An alarming portion of government funded NGOs use the money to hire consultants to lobby the government for more funding. This seems to be one of Ottawa’s major industries, especially when you add in the NGOs used for astroturfing unwanted government policies.
The loss of "neutral" journalism by limiting what leviathan can corrupt is worth it. Journalism, like any other civic pursuit should be supported by willing customers rather than the looted pockets of taxpayers, particularly now with so many easy options for information access. I liken it to my opposition to subsidization of the arts. Joe sixpack who may prefer C&W (if that's what it's still called) is taxed to subsidize those who own tuxedos and drive their Teslas to the symphony and I say that as an unpaid musician playing in three different customer and privately supported community bands.